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Andy Warhol is credited with saying that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
From TV to music, the forces that democratized fame are challenging old economic models.
Old giants are struggling to survive in this new era.
“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
This quote, which likely originated in a 1968 brochure for an Andy Warhol exhibition, came decades before the rise of reality TV, vlogging, or the first social networks. Yet in predicting not just the ability for anyone to gain notoriety, but also the fleeting nature of that fame, I’d argue it nailed one of the defining cultural elements of our time.
(Though the quote is widely attributed to Warhol, it’s likely he never actually shared those exact words. It’s ironic that an artist known for his commentary on culture, fame, and branding is widely known for a quote that likely didn’t come from the artist himself.)
Many, many articles have been written over the past several decades about all the ways in which time has proven Warhol prescient. What I think is new, and only becoming apparent now, is the full extent to which Warhol’s vision of fame in the future is upending the economics of the media industry.
From TV to music and the text-based medium I work in, the forces that democratized fame and attention, that lowered the barriers to entry for creatives of all kinds and offered widespread and instantaneous distribution, have upended the economic models of old.
The result is a period of “hand-to-hand combat to see who is going to survive,” as Insider’s CEO Henry Blodget has said. And there’s every chance that at the end of that, there will an entirely new set of dominant players in media.
Here’s what’s going on:
We all want to be entertained all the time.
US adults spend more than 13 hours a day with media, according to Insider Intelligence. Given that a certain number of hours each day are spent sleeping, cooking, washing, etc., you could argue that at this point many Americans are spending almost every single waking moment with media.
That’s been made possible by technology.
Yes, this is obvious. But it bears repeating that it was the advent of computers, and particularly smart phones, that made this possible. I’m typing out this article on a MacBook while listening to the new Blur album on Spotify. My inbox is full of newsletters from Substackers and independent writers I follow. Tonight, I’ll watch something on Hulu while checking the notifications on my cell phone during ad breaks.
That same technology has also lowered the barrier to entry for content creators of all kinds.
Not only can I consume media on my cell phone, but I’m also able to create it. I can post to TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, or publish an article with ease. Photos of friends compete against professionally created videos in my Instagram feed. It is this democratization of distribution that put fame and attention so within reach. Case in point: There are now 39,000 accounts on TikTok with 1 million plus followers.
That created an abundance of content, and endless competition.
When I was growing up in the UK in the nineties, my family transitioned from terrestrial TV, where we had five channels, to cable, where we suddenly had more than a hundred. I would spend hours flipping between different music channels, looking for the music videos I wanted to watch. Now multiply that several times over, across every medium and device. That’s where we are today. Whatever your interest, whatever you find entertaining, you can find it with incredible ease.
That’s great for consumers, but it’s not great for the businesses that were built around controlling supply.
Everything competes with everything. Here at Insider, we compete with other publications like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but also TikTok, Netflix, and the cute baby pics your sister is posting in the family WhatsApp group. That offers incredible choice for consumers.
But many old-school media businesses, from TV channels to print newspapers to movie studios to record labels, were built around controlling the supply and distribution of media. Those terrestrial TV channels I used to watch had very little competition. I watched what they showed. Now, there is competition everywhere.
The most powerful companies in media today are platforms.
“Suits,” a show that stopped filming in 2019, is in the No. 1 spot on Nielsen’s streaming charts. Why? It moved to Netflix in June. Netflix didn’t make the show. It had been available on other platforms previously. But Netflix was able to put the show in front of its giant audience of almost 240 million subscribers, and bingo, a hit show is reborn.
In simple terms, it’s the companies that have scale, both in terms of users but also selection, that are positioned to win big in this new era. That means Netflix, which is the only streaming company making real money. It means YouTube. It means TikTok. It could mean Spotify, although even with more than 500 million listeners, it still doesn’t make money.
(Yes, there’s lots of room for niche players with distinct audiences too, plus companies that figure out how to thrive on these platforms.)
Consolidation is coming.
We’re all already online all the time. There are no extra hours to spend with media, unless the human races evolves to need significantly less sleep. That means the market for human attention has hit its limit, and now it’s everyone against everyone to win a share in the attention economy.
That means a whole host of media companies that (1) are trying to compete with the platforms, but don’t have the scale or resources to do so, and/or (2) have a cost structure built around the old industry model, and therefore face a struggle to survive.
In the TV world, many industry experts expect Warner Bros. Discovery to launch into another merger not long after the removal of a deal restriction in 2024, while Paramount likely faces a similar fate. Even Disney boss Bob Iger has put a for sale sign up on TV assets like ABC and FX, and is exploring creative structural options for ESPN.
For consumers, the past few years have been an incredible giveaway. That’s coming to an end.
There’s been a race between the major media companies to acquire users over the past several years, something you could describe as the “Netflix effect.” Streaming services have been underpriced in the name of attracting critical mass. That’s offered a great deal for consumers.
Think of it this way: I used to spend $15 to buy a single album on CD — often just to get access to one song. Now, I can pay $11 a month for Spotify and listen to hours of whatever I want wherever I want.
I also used to have to buy cinema tickets for my whole family to go see “Encanto.” Now, I can watch it on demand for $13 a month, and also watch “Only Murders in the Building” on Hulu, and watch whatever sports are showing on ESPN+, thanks to a Disney bundle.
Sorry to break it to you, but that era is over. Spotify loses money offering that great deal. Disney loses money in streaming offering that great deal. Prices have to go up. You can see this at Netflix and Spotify, which are raising prices from positions of strength. Even Iger over at Disney has fessed up underpricing Disney’s streaming offerings.
What does the future hold?
There used to be a few dominant media companies, then the internet and cell phones arrived, and there was a fresh wave of competition and innovation. There’s a strong chance that we’re now moving back to a world where there’s a few dominant media companies, albeit in different industry structures.
And arguably, these new dominant media companies are more powerful than the old dominant media companies. The internet offers the potential for scale that far exceeds anything possible in the old world.